Quarterly Update| October–December 2001 | Jamaica Homes News
Key Takeaways: Q4 2001 in Six Lines
- Afghanistan war begins October 7; Caribbean diaspora supports action but fears overreach
- Anthrax letters kill five; Caribbean community in Washington DC area shaken
- US Patriot Act passes October 26; diaspora civil liberties organisations alarmed
- Taliban government falls; Bonn Agreement establishes Afghan interim administration
- Shoe bomber Richard Reid fails to destroy flight; airport security intensifies again
- Jamaica tourism collapses post-9/11; diaspora fundraising and remittances fill gap
The War in Afghanistan Begins
On October 7, 2001 — less than four weeks after the September 11 attacks — the United States and the United Kingdom launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a military campaign targeting al-Qaeda forces and the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had provided them sanctuary. The opening strikes combined cruise missiles and precision bombs with special forces operations alongside Afghan Northern Alliance fighters, and the initial phase of the campaign proceeded with remarkable speed: by mid-November, the Northern Alliance had entered Kabul, and by the end of the year the Taliban government had been effectively dismantled as a functioning state power, though Taliban fighters remained active in rural areas and across the Afghan-Pakistan border.
For the Jamaican diaspora community, the beginning of the Afghanistan war prompted a nuanced range of responses. The broad principle — that those who planned and carried out September 11 must be dismantled as a threat — commanded overwhelming support across the community. The pain of September 11 was still raw: community members in New York were still learning who among their colleagues, neighbours and extended family had not survived; the dust that had blanketed lower Manhattan on September 11 was still being cleared from buildings miles from Ground Zero. There was little doubt in most of the community that a response was both necessary and justified.
At the same time, community organisations with experience in peace advocacy and in the consequences of military action on civilian populations raised concerns about the humanitarian situation in Afghanistan. The country was already devastated by more than two decades of war, drought, and displacement. Air strikes in civilian areas, however carefully targeted, would produce civilian casualties, and the Jamaican-British community’s significant connections to British peace movement organisations meant that the anti-war argument was heard alongside the pro-intervention position in community discussions. As the quarter closed with the fall of the Taliban government and the Bonn Agreement of December 5 establishing an Afghan interim administration under Hamid Karzai, the mood was cautiously hopeful but far from triumphant.
The Anthrax Letters: Terror Comes Through the Mail
In the weeks following September 11, a new and different kind of terror gripped parts of the United States. Letters containing spores of anthrax — a bacterial agent capable of causing fatal illness if inhaled — were mailed to media organisations and to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. By the end of the outbreak, five people had died and seventeen had been infected. The anthrax letters created a wave of fear that extended far beyond those directly affected: post offices, government buildings and newsrooms across the country implemented emergency procedures, and the sense that the October attacks were a second wave of the same campaign that had produced September 11 — though this was never confirmed — kept public anxiety at an acute level through the autumn.
For the Jamaican-American community in the Washington DC area — including in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which has one of the largest concentrations of Caribbean Americans on the East Coast — the anthrax scare was not an abstract media story. The Brentwood postal sorting facility in Washington DC, where two postal workers died of anthrax inhalation, served communities with significant Jamaican and Caribbean populations. The deaths of those two Black workers, while media attention focused more intensively on the Senate offices to which the letters were addressed, were noted with bitterness by community organisations that identified a pattern of unequal concern for different victims.
The Patriot Act: Diaspora Civil Liberties Concerns
On October 26, 2001, President Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act — a sweeping piece of legislation that dramatically expanded the surveillance and investigative powers of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The Act was passed with unusual speed and with minimal public or legislative debate given its scope: it passed the Senate 98-1 and the House 357-66 within weeks of September 11, in an atmosphere of national emergency in which scrutiny was difficult and opposition was politically costly. For diaspora civil liberties organisations, the Patriot Act was a source of immediate and serious concern.
The provisions that most concerned Caribbean diaspora community organisations included: the expanded authority for warrantless surveillance of phone and electronic communications; the broadened definition of “terrorism” that might sweep in political activism and community organising; the enhanced powers of immigration detention without charge; and the reduced judicial oversight of search and seizure. The concern was not hypothetical. The post-September 11 environment had already produced reports of non-citizen community members being detained, questioned and in some cases deported on immigration grounds in the general dragnet of the immediate aftermath. The Patriot Act, community lawyers warned, would make these practices more legally accessible and less subject to challenge.
Richard Reid: The Shoe Bomber
On December 22, 2001, a British national of Jamaican descent named Richard Reid was overpowered by fellow passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami after attempting to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes. Reid, who had converted to radical Islam and had links to al-Qaeda, was arrested and later convicted of terrorism offences. The incident, which could have destroyed the aircraft and killed all 197 passengers and crew, prompted an immediate and permanent change to air travel security: the requirement to remove shoes for X-ray screening at airports — a practice that billions of travellers have followed since — was a direct response to the shoe bomber plot.
The revelation of Reid’s Jamaican heritage generated significant and uncomfortable discussion within the Jamaican-British community. The facts of Reid’s biography — a difficult childhood in South London, time in prison, conversion to an extreme form of Islam in prison — were seized upon by some commentators to make claims about the Caribbean-British community that the community itself vigorously rejected. Community leaders were clear: Reid’s actions were his own; they reflected his individual radicalisation, not any feature of the Jamaican or Caribbean community from which one side of his family came. The episode reinforced the community’s determination to engage with questions of radicalisation and extremism as matters of child protection and community safety, not as occasions for collective guilt.
Jamaica: Tourism Collapses, Diaspora Steps Up
The September 11 attacks and their aftermath have been devastating for Jamaica’s tourism sector. Visitor arrivals from North America — the island’s primary market — fell sharply in the final months of 2001 as American and Canadian travellers cancelled or postponed international travel plans. The collapse has affected every sector of the tourism economy: hotels, resorts, transport operators, craft vendors, tour guides and the many small businesses that depend on a steady flow of visitors from North America and Europe. The Jamaica Tourist Board has been working urgently to maintain hotel bookings and to manage an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans directly and indirectly.
For the diaspora, the tourism collapse on top of the emotional devastation of September 11 itself has created an unusual moment of concentrated giving. Remittance volumes have increased as diaspora members recognise that family members on the island who depend on tourism-related employment are facing income collapse. Community organisations in the United Kingdom and North America have organised benefit events whose proceeds have gone to Jamaican community foundations and economic support programmes. The resilience of remittance flows in the face of even this level of crisis is a testament to the diaspora’s understanding of its own irreplaceable role in Jamaica’s economic fabric.
The longer-term outlook for Jamaica’s tourism sector depends heavily on whether US travellers return to international leisure travel in 2002, and on whether the island’s security environment — which some travel advisories have highlighted independently of September 11 — is managed in a way that reassures hesitant visitors. JAMPRO and the Tourist Board are working on marketing that emphasises Jamaica’s distance from the terrorism risk landscape and the warmth of its welcome, arguments that will take time to rebuild confidence that September 11 eroded in a matter of hours.
Jamaica Diaspora & Returnee Quarterly Update — Edition 100, covering October to December 2001. Published by Jamaica Homes News on 2 January 2002.
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